When thoughts originating in different domains can engage together, the result is an almost limitless capacity for imagination.” - British archaeologist Steven Mithin (The Prehistory of the Mind, 1996)
This section is a series of international exhibitions where art and travel are united through an ongoing dialogue with nature and culture. Travelling to these locations with exhibition invitations, residencies, adjunct work and workshops, Copland has created a body of work unified by the imagination and not restricted by techniques or genre.
Experiencing new imagery through travel is a tradition for the Romantic artist. This hardly serves to describe the Longitude and Latitude series where Romanticism becomes about forms of behaviour and is political and spiritual in its intention.
This is expressed in the symbolic aspects of the works where nature, heritage, artist books and habitat reveal a "narrative identity".
"Art mobility without meaning is simply movement, point-to-point consumption whereas to give this personal artistic movement a symbolic framework sowing seeds of commonality with art allows art to become less framed within itself and become part of the world.(Rodriguez. 2007) Theories do not enter the public domain but art migrates and has the potential to involve itself with the social realities of life, an art practice representing human movement as a commonality, a renegotiation of colonisation through art, a transculturation of diasporic images and stories." (Artist's diary 2011)